Ping-Pong Heart

by Martin Limon

  And then it struck me what he was planning. Korea was a peninsula, bordered by sea on three sides. Its only embarkation points were Kimpo International Airport and the port cities, including Inchon and Mokpo and Pusan. But he knew the Korean authorities would be ready to apprehend him at all of those exits. The only other way out of the country was across the heavily reinforced Demilitarized Zone. It was delusional for Blood to think we could make it across, even if he’d enlisted Commander Ku’s help.

  “You get it now, Sueño? That’s why I brought you up here. So you could escort me across Liberty Bridge and up north with your emergency dispatch and Criminal Investigation ID.”

  “We’d never make it across,” I said. “We’d be shot dead or blown to pieces by a land mine.”

  “Better than rotting in Leavenworth.”

  I had to think fast, stall him.

  “Look, Blood,” I said, “your situation’s not hopeless. Turn Miss Kim over to us. That’ll show your goodwill. Then hire a Stateside lawyer, keep your mouth shut, and once the JAG people take over the case, cut a deal.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Nam didn’t spill.”

  Then there was another pause, a long one this time. In the background I heard Miss Kim say, “I’m here, Geogie.” Then a loud slap, sounding almost like a crack.

  “Shut up!” Blood told her. “Keep your trap shut.”

  “Dalun salam do issoyo?” I asked. Are there other people there?

  “Aniyo,” she replied. No.

  A loud crash rang through the receiver, so loud I instinctively moved it away from my ear. Then another. “I told you to keep your trap shut!”

  Miss Kim shuffled away from the radio.

  “Hurting her isn’t going to do any damn good, Blood.”

  He picked up the mic and growled, “Don’t tell me what to do.” He inhaled to calm himself, and then continued. “The KNPs will keep after Nam. He’ll spill eventually.”

  “Spill what?”

  “My deal with Ku.”

  “Which was?”

  “Maybe too rich for my own good. But this was my last chance at that promotion to Major. If I didn’t make it, I was out on my ass. I couldn’t walk back out into civilian life with nothing. After all that hard work, all these years of sacrifice. It’s wrong to put a person in that position. Whatever happens, it’s the Army’s fault. They forced me to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “What the hell do you think? What would the North Koreans pay anything for? What’s the most important information they could want?”

  I tried to figure it out, but I was too worried about how to save Miss Kim and stop Blood from carrying out his insane plan. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I will. Hold on a minute.”

  He set the mic down and lowered the receiver volume, and then I heard a vague rustling in the background. Miss Kim said a couple of words. I couldn’t make out what they were, but she was clearly being compliant. She was trying not to make him angry.

  What followed was silence. I started to fiddle with the knobs, wondering if the radio had gone on the blink. Just as I was about to give up, cement scraped loudly on cement.

  I leapt to my feet and looked down. Someone was opening the door to the command bunker. I quickly began climbing down the ladder. Ernie, who’d had two years of combat experience in Vietnam, had done the right thing. He’d grabbed Fenton’s rifle and made his way to the opposite side of the bunker. That way, once I reached the ground, we would have whoever was emerging in a crossfire.

  Before I was halfway to the ground, red tracers lit the night and a line of bullets stitched the dirt below me.

  From a prone position, Ernie fired.

  Whoever had let loose the first burst ceased their assault. I reached the bottom and lay flat on the ground in the open, aiming my rifle at the dark opening. And then something emerged, low and dark, running to my right away from the command center. I followed it with the crosshairs of the M-16, but realized that Blood’s bulk was accompanied by someone else’s small frame. Ernie held his fire because he was afraid of the same thing, that the second person was Miss Kim.

  The dark figures ran to a large Quonset hut near the main entranceway and disappeared around the corner. Both Ernie and I sprinted after them, but before we reached the domed building on the far side, an engine coughed to life.

  “The three-quarter-ton!” Ernie shouted.

  The Quonset hut was twenty yards long, and we reached the end just as a pair of headlights burst to life around the corner. We were temporarily blinded. The engine roared and the truck careened toward us. Neither of us fired, again for fear of hitting Miss Kim. The truck scraped the tin edge of the Quonset and would’ve hit us if we hadn’t tumbled backward. Then it sped off. We stood by helplessly as the taillights swerved in a semicircle, heading for the main gate of Camp Arrow and the road that led downhill to Tuam-dong. We ran to the gate, but before we could get there, the bumper of the three-quarter-ton smashed into the wood-frame and barbed-wire construction and burst it open. The big doors were still rebounding as we ran through them. We stopped at the cliff overlooking the winding mountain road, watching red taillights swerve down the sinuous path. In the distance, a string of bright lights shone across the expanse of Liberty Bridge.

  “There’s movement down there,” Ernie said.

  He was right. Tons of it. At least a dozen vehicles. “KNPs,” I replied.

  “Will Kill know to stop him?”

  I raised my M-16 and pointed it toward North Korea. I fired off three quick shots, then three slower shots, and three quick shots again. Then I changed the clip and repeated the process, signaling SOS.

  Now all we could do was stand and watch. A line of police vehicles moved toward the intersection between the road from Camp Arrow and the Main Supply Route.

  “He’s not gonna stop. They’ll blast him with everything they’ve got,” Ernie said.

  If the KNPs ordered Captain Blood to halt and he didn’t, they would almost certainly open fire. And if he shot at them first, which I believed he would, the Korean National Police would unleash every ounce of artillery they possessed.

  “We have to stop him,” I said. We couldn’t live with ourselves if Miss Kim got caught in the crossfire. We had promised to protect her and we had failed.

  Ernie raised his rifle. “I can hit his gas tank,” he said. “That’ll force him to stop.”

  “If you manage to aim that well,” I said, “it’ll explode.”

  Ernie lowered his rifle. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, maybe the KNPs will use caution.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  It was a bet against the odds. But all we could do was watch. And hope.

  “Look!” Ernie said. I squinted but couldn’t see anything. “In front. They’re fighting.”

  And then I spotted it in the weak moonlight. The truck was slowing and occasionally veering away from the road, then back onto it. On the left side of the cab, the burly figure of Captain Blood, nothing more than a shadow from this distance, seemed to be swaying from side to side. But in the right side of the cab I couldn’t see anything.

  “She must be lying down on the seat,” Ernie said, “kicking him.”

  It was the smartest thing she could do. Captain Blood’s upper body strength was clearly much greater than Miss Kim’s, but her legs were almost as strong as his arms. And if she braced herself against the door and kicked with all her might while Blood was trying to navigate down a steep mountain road, he’d more than have his hands full.

  The three-quarter-ton truck reached level ground, but there was a deep depression before the road rose again and hooked up with the main highway. The truck slowed. Pro
bably because of Miss Kim’s assault, Blood seemed to be having trouble shifting into a lower gear. Before he could pick up speed again, a dark figure rolled out of the side of the cab.

  “It’s her!” Ernie shouted. “She jumped out of the damn truck.”

  But Blood didn’t stop the three-quarter-ton. On the contrary, he seemed relieved to be rid of his troublesome hostage. He revved the engine so loudly we could hear it all the way from the edge of the cliff, and the truck picked up speed as it breached the rise, the back wheels sliding until it straightened up and sped directly toward the center of the line of KNP vehicles. Gunfire erupted. The truck rammed into a blue patrol car and plowed to its right, then more gunfire rang out and the three-quarter-ton swiveled almost completely around, its engine whining as if in anguish. Just as it was about to regain traction, more bullets whistled through the night, and the front of the three-quarter-ton burst into flame. Still trying to escape, the burning truck left the KNP vehicles behind, but as its distance from the broken line of cars increased, the flames leapt higher, fanned by the air. For a moment, it seemed as if Captain Blood might get away. Until the explosion.

  The truck, now a giant ball of fire, inexplicably continued to speed in a straight path down the road. Finally it wobbled and careened sideways, struggling to regain traction. It stabilized temporarily, but then lost control again, sliding and eventually flying like a burning comet off the edge of the road down a gradual incline of at least a hundred feet. Near the bottom, it shuddered to a stop before imploding. The flames roasted and growled, charring metal and presumably flesh on the shore of the churning river.

  Ernie and I ran downhill from Camp Arrow so fast that both of us stumbled and fell a couple of times, skinning our knees and our palms. Finally, we reached the ravine where Miss Kim had jumped from the three-quarter-ton, and using a flashlight, I found her. She was moaning and bruised, but alive and breathing.

  “Geogie,” she said when she saw me.

  “Yes,” I replied, kneeling close. “Stay still. Help is on the way.”

  Then she spotted Ernie. For a moment her eyes held a pleading look, but then it was as if she remembered something, and she abruptly turned away. Ernie grabbed her hand anyway and held it until a small Korean ambulance rolled up the rocky dirt road.

  We waved the medics over and supervised as they hoisted her onto a stretcher. Like praetorian guards, Ernie and I escorted the stretcher until it was slid safely into the back of the medical van. The door was shut. We both stood and watched as Miss Kim was driven away.

  -35-

  When Fenton’s first three-quarter-ton truck had been totaled trying to run us down after we’d left Miss Lee’s kisaeng house, the KNPs had taken it into custody. Since it was a military vehicle, they were generally supposed to turn the wreck over to the US Army right away, but in this case, they waited. I had asked Mr. Kill to have his forensic team analyze it to test my theory: that it had been used to transport Major Schultz’s body to the alley behind the Dragon King Nightclub in Itaewon.

  Two days after the incident at Camp Arrow, Ernie and I sat in Mr. Kill’s office as he broke the news.

  “No traces of blood, hair, or anything else that would indicate a human body was transported in that truck.”

  “So it wasn’t the Five Oh First who murdered Major Schultz?”

  “I’m not saying that,” he replied. “I’m only saying they didn’t use that truck to transport his body to Itaewon.”

  “But what else could they have used?” I was thinking out loud now. As far as I knew, it was the only truck they had signed out, but I could double-check that. Kill didn’t bother to answer. Then something else struck me. “How’s Nam holding up?” I asked.

  “Not well.”

  “You set Bang on him?”

  “Yes.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, trying not to think of the torture Interrogator Bang was inflicting on Mr. Nam.

  After Blood’s corpse had been found in the smoldering remains of the three-quarter-ton, I told Kill that the 501st commander had been about to receive a massive payday from the North Koreans in exchange for classified, top-priority information.

  We settled on nuclear-tipped missiles. There’d been a lot of speculation in the European and Japanese papers about the US bringing nuclear weapons to the Far East, both in the form of land-based tactical missiles and guided missile systems aboard the ships of the US Navy’s 7th Fleet. Every time a US aircraft carrier pulled into a Japanese port, a group of anti-nuclear demonstrators was gathered there to greet them.

  But the US military’s policy was to neither confirm nor deny such rumors. In Korea, the Pak Chung-hee regime simply didn’t allow anti-nuclear demonstrations. And they censored the subject in the press, so the Korean public was largely unaware of the controversy. Nobody in the US was particularly interested. But the North Koreans were, and they routinely accused the US of bringing nuclear missiles into South Korea. There was no doubt that the US had brought in regular tactical missiles.

  Raytheon was the subcontractor for the Department of Defense’s missile maintenance contract; I’d even played poker with a couple of their civilian technicians. But even in those private games, with plenty of beer and liquor flowing, no one was gauche enough to ask the Raytheon techs about the weapons they were installing. Such things simply weren’t discussed during a civilized game of chance.

  But this theory gave me something to look for when I searched the 501st records. I soon discovered a close connection between Captain Blood and a half-dozen officers of the missile command near Chunchon, which gave credence to the idea. Would all of these officers have willingly divulged classified information? Probably not. But if he was there under the guise of a counter-espionage investigation, he could probably have learned a hell of a lot—for instance, whether the missiles were in fact nuclear-tipped. And if so, where they had been deployed, how many there were, whether they were moved periodically. This information would be worth a small fortune to the North Korean Communists.

  But we didn’t have time to construct an airtight case against Blood. Besides, he was dead, and as far as 8th Army was concerned, any crimes he’d committed could just as well remain hidden. The honchos were already constructing the cover story of the roadway accident that took his life. If they stuck with that, he’d receive an honorable posthumous discharge and someone—it was unclear who—would inherit his Serviceman’s Group Life Insurance. Most importantly, of course, 8th Army wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  Meanwhile, our North Korean spymaster, Commander Ku, was almost certainly spooked. We had to work with what we had and act quickly.

  “Maybe we can convince Mr. Nam to cooperate,” I said.

  “He’s more afraid of the North Koreans than he is of us,” Kill replied. “If they discover he’s compromised, they’ll kill him on sight.”

  “Unless he has something to offer.”

  Ernie crossed his arms and studied me. “Wait a minute, Sueño. This spy stuff is not our department.”

  “Whose department is it?” I asked.

  “The Five Oh First, but . . .”

  “Captain Blood’s gone, and we don’t know who else in their squad was involved in this mess. It’s up to us now.”

  Kill’s eyes narrowed. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Set Mr. Nam free. When the North Koreans come after him, he can offer them a deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “He can offer them access to somebody new. Somebody who knows about the missiles.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I told him. “But I’m working on it.”

  It took two months. During that time, Nam was released, and he immediately set about liquidating his real estate holdings and other business interests. After paying his debts, he was as poor as a church mouse, but it was worth it to him—the Korean
government had agreed to let him off with less than a year of jail time if he cooperated in the capture of Commander Ku. From an outside perspective, it looked like the KNPs had let him out so he could raise enough money to pay off everyone involved; the cops, Mr. Kill, and the judge overseeing the case. Nam no longer had any way of contacting Commander Ku directly—all the old phone numbers to Ku’s go-betweens had been disconnected—but we figured that Ku and his operatives would be watching. When they saw that he was rapidly selling everything for cash, they’d reason that he needed the money to pay his way out of trouble.

  Mr. Kill set up a liaison between Nam and himself, an incredibly dangerous job. Officer Oh had taken it on voluntarily. She’d be temporarily relieved of her regular duties as Kill’s assistant, and would masquerade as a bargirl named Pei in Yongju-kol, one of the largest and most raucous GI villages in Korea.

  Miss Lee Suk-myong, Nam’s girlfriend and erstwhile kisaeng, had been found, arrested and placed in solitary confinement, away from the action so she wouldn’t inadvertently spill the beans.

  Nam began to lead a progressively more dissolute life, convincing even his family that he’d fallen on hard times and was spiraling downhill fast into drink and despair. Kill had several operatives keeping an eye on him, and they said that Nam was playing his part so well that he might become the first Korean Oscar-winner.

  Commander Ku eventually nibbled. Not directly, but via one of his men.

  Nam was beaten to a pulp.

  It was Officer Oh, or Miss Pei, who found him facedown in the mud in a back alley. The man who’d done the beating had been waiting for her. As “Miss Pei” knelt in her high heels to help Nam up, the huge thug stepped out of the shadows. She reached for the knife that she kept in her purse.

  Instead of attacking her, the man simply pointed at Nam and said, “Saturday at midnight. Tell him to be at the Sejong Inn in Munsan. If he’s not there, we’ll come looking for him. It won’t be good.”

  With that, the man tromped away into the darkest part of the alley, splashing mud on Miss Pei’s nylons.